Elasticsearch 6.0.0-rc1 released

We are excited to announce the release of Elasticsearch 6.0.0-rc1, based on Lucene 7.0.0. This is the fifth in a series of pre-6.0.0 releases designed to let you test out your application with the features and changes coming in 6.0.0, and to give us feedback about any problems that you encounter. Open a bug report today and become an Elastic Pioneer.

IMPORTANT: This is a pre-release and is intended for testing purposes only. Indices created in this version will not be compatible with Elasticsearch 6.0.0 GA. Upgrading 6.0.0-rc1 to any other version is not supported.

Lucene 7

The wait is finally over: Lucene 7 has finally, officially made GA and we're happy to include this in this Elasticsearch 6.0.0-rc1 release! Up until this point, the Elasticsearch 6.0.0 alphas and betas have included snapshot builds of Lucene 7, so if you've been tracking these releases you may already been aware of or tried some of the benefits: things like space savings and performance benefits of sparse-valued fields and index sorting for faster querying. However, now we've been able to fully incorporate the official Lucene 7.0.0 release into this release candidate!

X-Pack Security is. just... better!

Thanks to the feedback we've received from early testers of 6.0, we've made a number of improvements for rc1. These include a variety of improvements including some in documentation, usability improvements to the setup-passwords utility, and to the way TLS is enforced in the cluster. For more information, have a look at the X-Pack Security documentation and hop on over to the install instructions to try it out.